Mike Barrett is State Senator for eight Massachusetts communities — Bedford, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Concord, Lincoln, Waltham, Weston, and a large part of Lexington.
Mike serves as Senate Chair of the Legislature’s Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy. The committee’s jurisdiction covers everything from cell phones to alternative energy to public utility reform to carbon pricing.
In 2017 he was appointed Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy. Since then, Barrett has been chief architect for the Senate of three major climate acts passed by the Legislature in as many two-year sessions. An Act Creating A Next Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy, came out in 2020, although its effect was delayed for a time by Republican Charlie Baker’s veto, overridden by the Legislature in early 2021. 2022 saw An Act Driving Clean Energy and Offshore Wind. In 2024 came an Act Promoting a Clean Energy Grid, Advancing Equity and Protecting Ratepayers. None of these were typical “bills” in the sense that they dealt with only one or two issues. Each is an ambitious roll-up of multiple initiatives. The 2021 Act features 114 separate sections; the 2022 Act, 100 sections; and the 2024 Act, 140 sections. Taken together, the three bills situate Massachusetts as a national leader in the fight against climate change.
Earlier, in January 2013, Barrett was named Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities. In 2015 Barrett was named chair of the Senate Post-Audit and Oversight Committee, a unique body charged with overseeing implementation of all state programs run by the governor and his appointees. Barrett’s tenure on the oversight committee was notable for the preparation and publication in November, 2016, of “Fine Time Massachusetts: Judges, Poor People. and Debtors Prison in the 21 Century,” an investigation that uncovered 105 instances, drawn from just three Massachusetts counties in 2015, in which state judges had sentenced indigent defendants to jail not for criminal convictions but for their inability to pay various fines, fees, and court costs imposed during time spent in the judicial system. The report prompted change, first, by the Massachusetts judicial system, and then, in 2018 and 2022, by the Legislature and the Governor.
For 17 years before his 2012 election, Mike made his living in health care and information technology, first as CEO and General Counsel of the Visiting Nurse Associations of New England, a health care system composed of 70 home health nursing agencies, and then as a health care IT analyst for Forrester Research and Critical Mass Consulting. Prior to working in the private sector, Mike served in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and State Senate, where he was a leader on issues ranging from gay rights to human services.
In 1990, during his first stint as State Senator, Mike wrote an Atlantic Monthly cover story in which he advocated a longer school day and year for American students. A year later, he was named one of nine commissioners on the National Education Commission on Time and Learning, created by the U.S. Congress to examine the issues raised in the Atlantic article.
In 1992 Mike drafted and saw through to enactment domestic violence legislation for Massachusetts that was precedent-setting in the United States, in that it required judges to consult a comprehensive computerized registry of offenders before they ruled on requests for restraining orders. He was also successful as lead sponsor of major environmental legislation regulating uses of toxic materials in manufacturing within the state.
Mike graduated from Harvard College and the Northeastern University School of Law. He lives in Lexington with his wife Nancy. They have twin daughters.